One of the best lessons I ever learned was that it was OK to fail. It is OK to make mistakes. Failure has a wonderful way of teaching you lessons, sometimes very painful lessons, that you can use the next time you tackle a problem. You may not learn the lesson the first time, or the second, or fifth time, but eventually each failure will teach you something you can use later.

How did I learn this? By recognizing one crucial thing – no one starts off being the best at something. All the greats of anything did it through hard work, something you can read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and his 10,000 hours idea (that to truly master something you need to spend 10,000 hours on it).

And you know what? The first thousand hours were probably filled with failures.

And the best part about failure is that when you succeed, that’s all anyone will ever remember.

Josh Chan, a student at Stanford University, sent me a video he submitted to Stanford FCU’s video scholarship contest. It’s a superbly done stop-motion video that explains how saving a penny a day can yield you hundreds of dollars after only a short while. I was impressed by the stop motion (I imagine this took a lot of work) and the fact that Josh is financially savvy enough to recognize the value of compounding interest while in college. I wish I was that financially cognizant at his age!

The winner of the contest will be based on the number of votes he or she gets so if you have a moment, register and vote for his video. You can vote once a day until the end of September. If you’re as impressed as I am by the video, I know you’ll join me in voting for him.

My wife and I recently returned from the most amazing trip to Europe. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime, whirlwind trips where you have a ridiculous amount of fun, meet all manner of interesting people, and come back more cultured, educated, and open-minded than you ever expected.

In this video, I talk about the idea of whether we are working to live or living to work and how it’s important to take a step back, from time to time, to think about our situation.

This week I had the great pleasure of being on ABC News’ Money Matter television program. For nearly seven minutes of LIVE television, I discussed credit reports with host Tanya Rivero. We discussed how often I check my credit reports, the different types of credit inquiries, what’s in your credit report, and how damaging late payments can be on your credit worthiness and credit score.

As a kid, I never collected baseball cards, but I collected all sorts of other things. I collected comic books, I collected comic book cards, I collected Magic: The Gathering cards, and all of these things are sitting in my basement right now, slowly appreciating in value.

I saw The Baseball Card Movie at Kottke.org and invested ten minutes watching the whole thing, it was great. Not only did the accent transport me back home (the Baseball Card Dugout is located in Brooklyn, NY) but it showed me what happens when a childhood hobby meets an adult allowance.(Click to continue reading…)

If there’s nothing else you learn about personal finance, remember that it’s more about psychology than it is about numbers. You don’t go over your credit limit because you don’t know how to add, you go over because you either don’t know you’re that close or you don’t care. You don’t go into debt because you weren’t capable of doing the math that showed that you were spending more than you earned. In the end, it’s mostly psychology and I talk about some different “games” or tricks you can use to help you be more responsible.

I added three markers in the video for the points where I talk about Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball, the 100 Boxes, and the Zero Spend Days. It’ll help if you want to skip certain parts.

Finally, my apologies for sounding all stuffed up, the allergy season is in full force in Maryland and the Loratadine I’ve been taking doesn’t seem to be cutting it.

For the last few weeks, my wife and I have been visiting the local shelters and adoption shows to try to find a little guy to join our family. A few weeks ago, we met Tobey, a 7 year old Beagle who hasn’t had a “real” home in quite some time (I say real because he’s been a combination of fostered and kenneled, but treated very well throughout the whole process). This past weekend, we had a quick home inspection and we passed! We were a little surprised but they let us keep him that very day!(Click to continue reading…)